


Together We Will Live Forever

by sinuous_curve



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Ariadne-centric, F/M, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-05
Updated: 2010-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-11 11:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Ariadne goes back to Paris because LA was only ever an incidental destination at the conclusion of something else. The unspoken fear that passed between all the members of the team was that they would never make it to the states with their minds intact. Landing feels like more like a dream than anything else had.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Together We Will Live Forever

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ineffort](http://ineffort.livejournal.com) for an incredibly fast and helpful beta, [stele3](http://stele3.insanejournal.com) for looking this over when I was stuck, and [lyo](http://lyo.livejournal.com) for general hand holding and support.

Ariadne goes back to Paris because LA was only ever an incidental destination at the conclusion of something else. The unspoken fear that passed between all the members of the team was that they would never make it to the states with their minds intact. Landing feels like more like a dream than anything else had.

It was decided (unilaterally and without real discussion, so far as Ariadne saw) that they would all go in their own directions. Saito's payment for successful completion of the job adds a comfortable padding of zeroes to their bank accounts. Funnily, Ariadne forgot somewhere along the way that Saito lay at the genesis of it all, not a random act of fate. She felt like just as much a tourist as him.

From LAX, she takes a cab to an obscenely expensive hotel, trying not to burst into giddy, hysterical laughter that this is the moment when a real sense of unreality sets in. Her totem rests heavy and _correct_ in her pocket and she presses her palm to bulge through the fabric of her jeans. At the same time, she tries to recreate the world around her and doesn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that she can't.

The first thing she does in her hotel room (it's not white, she notes, and it hasn't been destroyed, and Mal isn't sitting calmly on the couch, hands cupped around an idea) is strip down to her naked skin and step into the shower. She turns on the water as hot as it will go and lets the spray pound down on her upturned face. The golden chess piece sits in the soap dish, little drops of water clinging to the contours.

Ariadne presses her hands to her body as the heat slowly flushes her skin pink, then reddish. She feels a little light-headed and dizzy. This is reality, she supposes, and she has spent months living around and in dreams.

*

Everything is caught somewhere between familiar and alien.

Ariadne's flat is exactly as she left: the same inherited couch with shining spots of wear in the upholstery sits against the living room wall, beneath five dollar prints she bought on the side of the street and tacked up to make it seem less like a borrowed space. It's her brightly colored, thick mugs on the drying rack, between blue glass plates and a bowl with little painted birds around the rim. Her bed is unmade, like always, with jersey sheets tangled in a dark red quilt. When Ariadne closes her eyes and touches her fingers to these objects, they feel familiar.

Maybe the problem is that now she knows the line between reality and not is much finer and blurrier than she thought, or wanted to believe.

She doesn't know how to trust it with the same gut deep certainty she used to have. The floor beneath her feet, the warm sunlight coming in through the window; they're the basis of her existence and now she knows they can be built by one reasonably creative mind. She has built worlds from mind and memory and will and they all felt right, too.

Maybe this is where the slip begins, she muses. With the idea that realities and dreams are not easily or willingly divisible.

Insomnia, Ariadne supposes, is a somewhat inevitable consequence. So she spends her long nights sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor on her flat next to the open door that leads to her small balcony. There are a few empty terracotta pots pressed against the wrought iron bars, abandoned homes of long dead plants.

Paris hums quietly around her, creaking and sighing with old age. Ariadne sets the bishop upright and topples it over again and again and listens for the faint strains of synchronizing music that should be and isn't there. She wonders what number Arthur's loaded die always lands on.

*

Ariadne goes to class, but the lectures have stopped meaning anything. The hallowed, stately words from her teachers buzz in her ears and her classmates look like children desperately playing at adulthood. She catches fragments of their conversations, about homework and parents and altered states. They seem so terribly, terribly young and, not for the first time, Ariadne does the math of dream time in her head.

She feels like she's surrounded by a bubble of knowing, some sense of awareness, that filters everything coming at her. Irrationally, she wants to ask them all if they know there are ways to break the world into neat pieces and stitch them back together into patterns that don't have homework or parents and only the most incredible altered states.

The pages of her notebooks fill with increasingly complicated maze designs, drawn in multicolored pens. She traces out the way through in single, unbroken lines of black marker that bleed through the paper, leaving uncertain imprints on the pages beneath. When she finishes, she writes _the architect_ in the corner and the date.

Slowly, she begins to evolve worlds around the pen lines. She creates mazes with two possible paths, then three, then none at all. The ability to cause such shattering change with a single stroke of pen consistently astonishes her and from that she begins to layer contradictions on top each other. There's always at least one staircase that always goes up, but never gains height. She creates around the skeletal framework of her memories.

Sometimes, at the bottom of the page, she sketches the rough outlines of crumbling towers built and destroyed by hands in the sand of a beach. Ariadne is always deeply conscious of the fact that those towers are neither her dreams or memories.

"It's only when you wake up," Ariadne murmurs, "That you realize anything was strange."

*

To Ariadne's credit, she does look up legal means of extraction. It's all classified army crap that everyone suspects it happening anyway and medical research that sounds too uncomfortably cold and a few random stabs of law enforcement trying to keep up with the times. They all see it as the means to an ends, a way to get to something else. All she wants to do is create for the sake of creation.

Even so, she dutifully prints out a list, folds it into neat eighths, and tucks the page into her wallet. Before long, the lines start to fade at the creases from how many times she's pulled it out, opened it, and read the blurring words. In some small part of her mind, she always expects something new and right to just appear, except this is reality and that kind of thing doesn't happen.

No one really wants her to build in the ways she now knows she can; creating logically illogical worlds, consistent and smooth and seamless and serving as a facade for labyrinths of her own divining. Professor Miles told her again and again that creation is only worthwhile when it's done for the sake itself. And Ariadne didn't sacrifice the ability to dream her own dreams for banality.

One by one, she crosses out the options on the printed list until there's nothing left. And one night, sitting cross-legged on her balcony, she writes _right and wrong are subjective_, then easily tears up the page along the worn lines. She tosses the pieces outward and they arc slowly toward the street in meandering, floating paths.

It's remarkably easy to find Dominic Cobb's phone number on her laptop.

*

She's sitting outside the cafe in the sunshine. It's warm on the top of her head and against her shoulders through the thin fabric of her shirt. An untouched cup of tea sits beside her wrist, gleaming pale brown and trembling slightly whenever a car drives past. There's a chip on the china rim and Ariadne touches her thumb to it. It's so familiar, to be sitting at the little iron table where she's passed hours and hours of her life. But it feels deceptive now. Her life is without anchor.

Ariadne's phone rings twice before she answers. Dom breathes heavily on the other end of the line five thousand miles away on the other side of the world. The greatest difference between them is that Dom never wants to go back and Ariadne has trouble imagining how she'll live if she can't.

She thinks she can hear his children, poor motherless things who may or may not recognize their father, laughing in the background. There's the quiet thunder of their feet on the floor as they run, talking in high, giggling voices. Ariadne feels like she lost herself somewhere in Fischer's dreams and the pieces are scattered in Limbo.

But she's an Architect in a way she has never been anything else and her instinct is always to build.

"How do you keep from doubting everything you see?" Ariadne asks. "When you know that everything can be built by someone else and that it's so easy to get lost."

"You don't," Dom says. "You learn to live with the doubt. Or don't."

The words mean something and then something else. Ariadne closes her eyes. She can remember the pounding rain from Yusuf's dream on the first level and the awful shock of a subconscious army. She can remember the warm, chaste press of Arthur's lips against hers and the world tilting in improbable ways. She remembers the cold feel of the snow on what should have been the bottom level. And, perhaps most of all, she remembers the moment of expansive, overwhelming terror when she jumped off the balcony in Limbo.

"The worst part is that all I want is to go back," Ariadne says, opening her eyes to the old buildings and the passing people. "That's all I dream about. When I dream at all. It's not enough, anymore, to just sketch out these things I imagine when I know that there's a way to see them real."

She hears the shushing sound of a sliding door being closed; the ambient noise abruptly cuts to a truer silence. Ariadne wonders just what it cost Cobb to do what he did. "What are you asking me?" Cobb says quietly.

"I'm asking you," Ariadne says, "to tell me what to do."

*

There's a rack of newspapers in both English and French in a corner of the main atrium of the college's biggest building. Ariadne only haphazardly attends lectures anymore, but every morning she wakes up and walks to school and stands in front of the papers. She skims the headlines, as though any news about Cobb or Eames or Yusuf or Arthur would ever warrant a front page headline. It bothers her that she doesn't know Arthur's last name.

It's strange seeing Fischer's name in 72 point font, screaming out a world's surprise and rage that he would dismantle such an empire. The unspoken incredulity that anyone would be strong enough to turn down the chance to be a financial god.

Ariadne brushes the tips of her fingers against the thin, grubby paper and thinks _you're all very welcome_. Her fingertips come away dusted lightly in black. She was surprised to find that Robert Fischer was not a bad man, just fallibly human.

*

Once, Ariadne goes back to the abandoned warehouse where the genesis of all this change lies. It's an inauspicious place, for the resonating effect it's all had on her and her life. She thinks if she were a person more prone to vanity, that would bother her. But it doesn't, not really. Inside the thick concrete walls it's cool and dim and her footsteps echo. It reminds her of a church.

There's nothing left that wasn't there before Arthur chose it. In fact, she fairly certain if she had a picture of that day, it would look precisely and exactly the same. She thinks she understood him a little, or least understood the strength of his worth. Arthur might not have been a builder, but he kept everything from collapsing.

The floor is covered in a thin, fine layer of dust and grit. The battered lawn chair in which she first learned to remake the world stands defiant and abandoned in the middle of the ponderously empty room. It's curious to be able to consider how naive she was even after that first day. Like a little kid with a new toy.

Ariadne sets down her bag and takes off her jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. The rubber webbing is cool against the backs of her arms. She arranges her limbs how sense memory murmurs they were, then closes her eyes. She doesn't consciously mean to fall asleep, but she always wants to dream.

When she opens her eyes, slowly, it's faded to purple and blue twilight and her cheeks are damp. She doesn't remember the dream and she supposes that's what assures her more than anything else. It's just a blurred mess of sensation and sound prickling the short hairs on the back of her neck and thighs and arms. Residual warmth has settled low in her belly and her skin snaps from phantom touch.

Ariadne touches her mouth and pulls her knees to her chest.

*

One morning, Ariadne skips a lecture and wanders through the city streets until she finds an English bookstore with a front window full of battered paperbacks, cracked spines and worn covers with barely legible titles. A bell chimes softly overhead when she pushes her way through the door on the soft push of a cool wind.

It's dim and faintly, pervasively musty inside. Shelves meander in twisting, soft shapes that follow an internal logic she cannot parse. She wishes, overwhelmingly, to be able to build a labyrinth like this and lose herself.

An old man sleeps behind a faded wooden counter, hands laced over the swell of an ample belly. One of the wooden buttons on his knitted vest is undone, gleaming in the dull light. Gold rimmed glasses hang on a chain around his neck. He looks like a character from a book, or a dream.

Ariadne wanders through the shelves, trailing her fingers against the haphazard stacks of castaways. She has always liked the history of old things, which is part of the reason she came to Paris. The city has forgotten more stories than she will ever know.

She feels impermanent in every moment that she's awake, trying to reconcile this world around her with what reality used to mean. Ariadne is constantly, faintly aware of the bruised shadows smeared beneath her eyes from not sleeping. The surface of her totem is starting to scuff from how often she knocks it to the ground.

At the end of a row, between a copy of _The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe_ and a compendium of short fantasy novels, is a thick, tattered novel. The title has been rubbed away, but the author's name can just barely be made out. She feels a moment of intimacy at the sight of Professor Miles's name.

It's his magnum opus, written when extraction was a theory struggling to fruition. He believed in the ethics of what they were doing. Ariadne bites back a laugh.

*

The truth is, Ariadne knows absolutely that the Fischer job wasn't legal in any sense of the word. She knew that when she followed Cobb from the college, with her heart jumping faster against her ribs. She knew that when she drew the maze. She knew that when Arthur pushed the needle into her hand that first time. She knew that when she left, and she knew that when she came back.

And it's curious to her, in retrospect how little that truth mattered at the time, and still. She never asked Cobb or Saito why, why it was so goddamned important to have Robert Fischer dismantle the house his father built. That question came so much later, when she was already in a dream and understood the answer. By that point, it didn't matter.

Maybe it was human selfishness. She had experienced the expansive rush of creation and needed to chase that feeling. Everything else was irrelevant, because she _liked_ it and she was _good_ at it.

But Ariadne always knew, looking at the broken, secretive, wounded men that surrounded her in that warehouse, that she was the most conscious of what she was and what she was doing. Or really, why she was doing it. So maybe she never asked because she, however thoughtlessly, trusted Professor Miles and Cobb and Saito.

And maybe the real truth, the end all be all of realities, is that there is no concrete answer and it wouldn't matter if there was. In Arthur's dreams, listening to him teach her about the importance of building contradictions into labyrinths, she decided the cost was worth it.

*

She drops her totem.

She drops her totem, which wouldn't matter if the little bishop hadn't become her tether and anchor into this world that seems to wrap tighter and smaller with every breath she takes. It wouldn't _matter_ if someone else hadn't picked up the metal piece and pressed it back into Ariadne's palm.

The metal is cool against her skin, the contours as familiar as the backs of Ariadne's hands and the lines of her features reflected in a mirror. But the rending sense of panicked loss tears through Ariadne's chest anyway. The grounding power of the bishop is broken and now Ariadne can't _know_.

The girl who touched her totem passes from easy friendliness to unsettled fear, reaching out and asking if Ariadne is okay, if something is wrong, does she need anything. Behind the backs of her eyelids, Ariadne sees the spinning top that belonged to Mal and would never fall in a dream. She sees a cheap loaded red die that always falls on a number she doesn't know.

She drops the bishop with a dim clatter and turns, but she doesn't run. She doesn't. Laughter bubbles up on her throat, wild and terrified. She tries to bend the street and can't and knows that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

She can't live like this.

*

Cobb calls at two in the morning.

Which Ariadne senses is something done deliberately, so she doesn't answer. He wants to escape from this world he accidentally slipped into and she doesn't. They are, in a lot of ways, at odds with each other.

Eventually, her phone beeps to signal a message. Ariadne crawls across the tangled mess of her sheets and blankets and picks up her phone. She kneels on the mattress in the dark. It's been a long fucking time since she really slept. It feels like the world is unraveling around her.

Ariadne leans against the wall and cradles her phone against her ear. She deletes a message in concerned French from her department at the college, one from her mother wondering why she hasn't heard from her daughter, and empty breathing from a wrong number. Cobb's voice hesitates for a long moment, then says:

"What you're trying to do is dangerous, Ariadne. It's not what I intended you to walk with and I know it's not what Miles taught. Though, I guess I can understand it. Anyway.'

"It's an insular world. It relies on word of mouth and building contacts that can never admit they've heard of you. Partnerships are born out of necessity and very often they don't stick. I don't know where Eames is, at the moment. He might have decided to take his share and enjoy it. And Arthur--"

There's a pause and Ariadne inhales sharply.

"I can't and won't make promises for him and I don't know what he's planning. But I can contact him and I'll let him know.'

"Ariadne, before you make any choices, just. Take it from someone who spent a lifetime in Limbo and more time than I care to remember in dreams. Temptation is something that can kill you in the end. Don't lose track of what's important."

Ariadne closes her phone and her eyes.

*

Ariadne hasn't forgotten, will never forget, that she was never supposed to inhabit the dreams she built for the Fischer job. Her place was as the silent, creative partner, working with foam boards, glue, and years of untapped creativity. Her insistence to be brought in was because of Mal, or Cobb's violent shade thereof.

In a way, she was a security measure against the unstable prison Cobb had built to try and cage the monstrous weight of his guilt. In another way, she was nearly as much of a tourist as Saito.

She wonders why Cobb chose her to be the keeper of that precarious, overwhelming secret. In the moment, she can more easily understand the choice. The Fischer job's success was always so wildly, fantastically improbable. So much of their core belief in success lay in the iron certainty Cobb provided that it could be done.

The instability of that expansive, hurting, anchoring mind exposed would have cracked their makeshift team before they boarded the flight to Los Angeles.

But Ariadne does wonder why Cobb never told Arthur, not in all the time that collection of guilt and memory in the shape of a woman was seeping from her basement prison. She knows that Cobb and Arthur worked jobs with a less noble basis, but they were extractors nonetheless. Why take that risk?

Ariadne supposes, in such a way that she will never say anything to either man, that Cobb valued Arthur's partnership, his _respect_, too much to risk the loss of it.

*

On another day when she doesn't attend lecture, Ariadne sits on her balcony smoking a cigarette from a crushed pack an ex left on her bedside table. Part of the appeal of that ex was the way he always smoked after they fucked; it seemed bizarrely romantic to her back then, in the same way Paris itself was new and romantic. It tastes unfamiliar and acrid in the back of her throat, but the strangeness of the nicotine burn provides a kind of comfort.

The city around her is an adopted homeland, with bought legitimacy from connections to a French grandmother that died when Ariadne was small. She taught her granddaughter the words to _Frère Jacques_.

That rhyme became grade school classes, became high school classes and one summer at an immersion program, became a college major, became Ariadne the American expat in Paris, getting another degree in architecture and chasing something. The language slips off her tongue as easily as English now, but she can never insert it into her thoughts. It's always a matter of translation.

Sometimes she asks herself questions in English, then French, then English again. Back and forth like the nuances of another tongue will make the answer any easier to grasp. _Souhaitez-vous changer?_ Would you change it?

Given the option, would she go back and tell Cobb to find someone else to build his world? Would she tell Arthur what she saw in Mal's prison and stay awake on the ten hour flight? She differentiates between this and forgetting, because she believes in things that leave indelible marks.

Looking at the windows across the street, she thinks about the crushing loss when her grandmother died and the expansive, unrelenting joy when she fell asleep and opened her eyes to an imaginary world made real.

Weary, she grinds the cigarette out. She doesn't know.

*

Arthur (_devoid-of-imagination-Arthur_, her mind supplies in a fair imitation of Eames's voice) knocks on her door at five in the morning, startling Ariadne from a thin sleep curled up on top of her blankets. He looks immaculate in the dim hallway, hair neatly combed down and suit precisely tailored and pressed. He's holding his silver case in one hand and Ariadne thinks for a long moment that she must be imagining things.

There's a tingling awareness in the back of her mind that her flat is covered in meandering designs for dream world, multiplying in on each other to fantastically dilatant universes. She's in cut-off flannel pajama pants and a thin tank top, hair mussed, and the deep circles etched beneath her eyes have recently taken on a permanent cast.

"Are you doing anything?" Arthur asks.

Ariadne wonders, irrationally, why more people don't end up questioning the legitimacy of reality. It's the only place she has ever experienced moments of encompassing surreality.

"Am I doing anything at this specific moment?" she says slowly, deliberately. "Or in general?"

Arthur, good old stick-in-the-mud Arthur, has the grace to look faintly uncomfortable, if not genuinely embarrassed; it's like he's been caught in a mistake. Ariadne wants to tell him that the words to explain what her days have been like defy her abilities to communicate. She very honestly loves him, just for standing there at her door.

"I have a couple of prospective jobs." Arthur shifts his case from one hand to the other. "Honestly, I'm very good at what I do but, but, you know, that's not really enough on its own. And you, conveniently, are very good at what you do. And I thought, after Fischer, you might be. Bored."

Ariadne looks at his face and understands, very clearly, that Arthur sees people in a way he's not given credit for and that he doesn't really understand. Eames is a good forger because he can interpret the messy tangle of emotion and motivation that animates a person. Arthur knows the bad choices people will make and doesn't know how to stop them.

"Are you here because Cobb sent you?"

Arthur frowns. "No. I haven't spoken to Dom since Los Angeles. He seemed fairly determined to reabsorb."

For a blistering moment, Ariadne hates Dom Cobb and loves him and understands the impetus to offer a white lie. She takes a step back and opens the door wider. "Come in."

*

Asking for extraction feels a little too much like asking for an ill advised drink, or a hit. Especially in the gritty gray light of early dawn. So Ariadne makes tea with her heart thumping against her ribs and faint rushes of adrenaline pushing against her skin. Her hands don't shake, though, and she feels suddenly calm.

Arthur moves a stack of drawings done on butcher paper and sits down on her couch. He lays the PASIV case on the coffee table, balanced precariously on a stack of sketchbooks. A handful of markers roll off and clatter to the floor.

Ariadne carries two mugs to the living room and passes one to Arthur, taking stock. He's a little tanner than the last time she saw him, but she has a feeling the color won't extend past his cuffs and collar. She can't picture Arthur taking a quick vacation jaunt to somewhere sunny to drink mai tais on the beach. She curls her hands around the warm mug and takes a long sip of her tea. Arthur's eyes roam over her scattered work.

"You know this is dangerous," he says, tapping a thumb against the thick ceramic rim.

"No, with everything that happened on the Fischer job, I assumed the general climate was sunshine and roses," Ariadne says, drawing herself up to her full height and dignity. She doesn't forget that she's five one and wearing her pajamas.

Arthur frowns slightly. "It's not just that part, it's the whole job. People." He sets his mug down and fixes those dark eyes on her. "People burn out quick. And usually it's the Architects that go first."

The spectre of Mal stands unspoken between them, wild dark curls flying around her face and the remembered sound her voice.

"Are you trying to scare me?" Ariadne asks, raising an eyebrow. "Because I've flattered myself into thinking I did pretty well at the whole trial by fire bit. And I'm not a huge fan of people trying to take care of me when I haven't asked for it."

They stare at each other, still half-strangers despite everything that they endured together. And it's Arthur who blinks first, looking down at his hands. When he looks back up, there's a different set to his shoulders and cast to his face. "Okay," he says.

*

In deference to her living room crowded with the fruits of her frantic creation, they end up in her bedroom. While Ariadne dresses, Arthur makes the bed and he stares at her with spots of color high on his cheeks when Ariadne cackles.

They stretch out on her mattress with so little distance between them their fingers almost touch. Ariadne can feel the connector in her hand; it doesn't hurt, but the sensation never stopped being strange. She's missed it, though. She's missed the way anticipation builds in her chest and the back of her mind.

Arthur looks at her from across the bed, hand resting against the button. "Last chance," he says. "You can always change your mind."

Ariadne looks at the ceiling and listens to the so quiet sounds the PASIV makes. She never noticed them until they were deep in planning, how it hums and sounds like it has its own heartbeat. "You know the worst part about what Cobb did?"

"What?"

"He showed me that I could do this incredible thing," Ariadne murmurs, "And then he didn't understand what it was like to have that ability taken away."

As Arthur presses down, he says, "I know."

*

She opens her eyes standing on the corner of a city street. Cars rush past and pedestrians stand, waiting for the light to change. There's a newspaper stand to her right and a man selling flowers wrapped in brown paper. Warm sunlight presses against her face and Ariadne feels that tingle at the very base of her mind that says she could twist all of this in a moment, if she wanted.

A hand falls on her shoulder and she turns her head to Arthur standing with his hair slicked, in a neat suit. He looks the same, except there's the loose hint of a smile on his mouth. "You know," he says, "You never really learned everything that you can do. It was piecemeal, what we taught you. Enough to get through the job."

Ariadne looks up at the towering buildings that aren't real and inhales crisp air that doesn't exist. She looks at Arthur and says, "Teach me."

END


End file.
